Wrangham, R and Peterson D. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Houghton MifflinCo. NY, NY, 1996.
- The writers conclude by page 190 that a (the?) fundamental cause of violence is pride and/or arrogance. I would call it a pride/survival dynamic - the self interest in extending our way of life at the expense of others. It comes before the desire for territory, for resources, for mating rights. And “winning has become an end in itself,” (199). I find it helpful to dilute male aggression into two related categories: (1) territorial/geographic/resource expansion and (2) genetic expansion (mating rights). They both are manifestations of the unconscious desire for growth, or what Rene Dubos called “the euphoric urge for expansion,” (So Human An Animal, pg 25). This urge is both healthy and pathological, and fleshing out when it is which is a main theme of this website. It is seen both in a wolf pup gnawing on the marrow of old moose bone, as well as in a self-aware bipedal mammal with a strangely large cerebral cortex inventing such ecologically disastrous things as nuclear weapons, plastics, and internal combustion engines.
- Pride > Group Loyalty > Ethnocentrism (‘in-group out-group bias’) > Violence Against Others.
- The more fanatic the pride/group loyalty, the higher chance of “victory” (i.e. survival). Therefore, aggression gets rewarded. The sheer excitement of domination is like a drug. It is a transcendent and addictive experience (See page 197). We must note here that this kind of experience is more commonly seen in “religious” terms. But it should not be surprising to see fanaticism, pride, group loyalty, tribalism, domination, violence, and religion all together at the same time. These categories of human behavior cannot be siloed if we are to better understand them. Explaining them away in emotionless, valueless data as if the consequences weren’t dire only promotes further destructive behavior from a species which seeks to dominate both Nature and all other Others - as per the instruction of its religious and scientific faith.
- Deindividuation: the desire to dissolve “me” into “us.” The power of group loyalty (198).
- The desire for power. Power over what? Peers. Others. Nations. Nature. Etc. And “the problem is that males are demonic at unconscious and irrational levels,” (199). Because, even though “reason generates the list of possibilities, emotion [ultimately] chooses from that list,” (189). Reason analyzes (and importantly can do so infinitely with any issue, thereby giving the illusion of it’s power and importance), but decisions/actions are made by emotional choice. Men seek power first. They list reasons for it later.
Ch 1. Paradise Lost
(14) Defense of territory is widespread among many species, but the Kasekela chimpanzees [Gombe National Park, Tanzania] were doing more than defending. They didn’t wait to be alerted to the presence of intruders. Sometimes they moved right though border zones and penetrated a half mile or more into neighboring land. They did no feeding on these ventures. And three times I saw them attack lone neighbors. So they seemed to be looking for encounters in the neighboring range. These expeditions were different from mere defense, or even border patrols. These were raids.
(15) The deep thrusts into neighboring lands weren’t mere reactions, and they weren’t in search of food. The raiders passed up chances to feed on the way and often only on their return.
(17) So it went. One by one the six adult males of the Kahama [chimp] community disappeared, until by the middle of 1977 [these raids began in 1974] an adolescent named Sniff, around seventeen years old, was the lone defender. Sniff, who as a youngster in the 1960s had played with the Kasekela males, was caught late on November 11. Six Kasekela males screamed and barked in excitement as they hit, grabbed, and bit their victim viciously - wounding him in the mouth, forehead, nose, and back, and breaking one leg. Goblin struck the victim repeatedly in the nose. Sherry, an adolescent just a year or two younger than Sniff, punched him. Satan grabbed Sniff by the neck and drank the blood streaming down his face. Then Satan was joined by Sherry, and the two screaming males pulled young Sniff down a hill. Sniff was seen one day later, crippled, almost unable to move. After that he was not seen and was presumed dead.
(18) Horrifying as these events were, the most difficult aspect to accept was not the physical unpleasantness but the fact that the attackers knew their victims so well. They had been close companions before the community split.
- the same sentiment can be found in Napolean Chagnon’s Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes, The Yanomomamo and The Anthopologists: “..the Yanomamo frequently abduct women they know - or may have even grown up with as children,” (pg 227).
(22) Where does human violence come from, and why? Of course, there have been great advances in the way we think about these things. Most importantly, in the 1970s, the same decade as the Kahama killings, a new evolutionary theory emerged, the selfish-gene theory of natural selection, variously called inclusive fitness theory, sociobiology, or more broadly, behavioral ecology. Sweeping through the halls of academe, it revolutionized Darwininian thinking by its insistence that the ultimate explanation of any individual’s behavior considers only how the behavior tends to maximize genetic success: to pass that individual’s genes into subsequent generations. The new theory, elegantly popularized in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, is now the conventional wisdom in biological science because it explains animal behavior so well…the general principle that behavior evolves to serve selfish ends has been widely accepted, and the idea that humans might have been favored by natural selection to hate and to kill their enemies has become entirely, if tragically, reasonable.
- see The Social Conquest of Earth, EO Wilson’s group selection theory, for a challenge to selfish gene theory/inclusive fitness/kin selection. I.e. does natural selection happen at the individual level or the group level?
(24) Very few animals live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce the risks of inbreeding by moving to neighboring groups to mate. And only two animal species are known to do so with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans.
Ch 2. Time Machine
(40) Chimpanzees and Gorillas look very much alike, but Chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to Gorillas.
(41) The two [ape] species most closely related are chimps and bonobos. Next to this pair is humans. And then come gorillas, followed at a distance by orangutans.
(43) Homo Sapiens are only about 150k - 230k years old, and we have proceeded through enough shape-shifting to define at least four other, prehuman species in our background before getting back to the rainforest apes. We’ve changed so much so quickly that our present doesn’t tell us very much about even our recent past.
- See On Human Nature (Wilson) for Autocatalytic (any process that increases in speed according to the amount of the products is has created. The longer the process runs, the greater its speed, 84), and Hypertrophy (the extreme growth of pre-existing structures, 89).
- culture evolves faster than biology
(61) Timeline:
- 4.5 M yrs ago: upright walking
- Australopithecus (“Lucy”)
- 2 M yrs ago: stone tools and more wide spread meat eating
- 2 M - .5M ago: brain expansion
- 1.5 M ago: fire
- 150 K ago: language
- 70 K: “fiction,” story telling (see Sapiens book)
- 10 K: agriculture
- 7 K: war (Jericho)
- 3 K: writing, 1K gun powder, 100 ago vehicles
(62) Is the elaborate, nervous and anxious and proud, superstitious and self-deceiving edifice of cerebral material that makes up our humanity still deeply infused with the essence of that ancient forest brain?
Ch 4. Raiding
(63) That Chimps and humans kill members of neighboring groups of their own species is a startling exception to the normal rule for animals [outside of territorial defense]. Add our close genetic relationship to these apes and we face the possibility that intergroup aggression in our two species has a common origin…It suggests that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5 million year habit of lethal aggression.
(66) Intervillage war, declare the Yanomamo [Brazil/Venezuela border], takes place not over resources. It may be unleashed by something as theoretical as suspicion of sorcery or as mundane as a trivial argument. Or a couple of men from different villages may begin fighting over a failed agreement, sexual jealousy, or suspicion of adultery. Yanomamo say it happens most often over women.
- I.e. mating rights…genetic expansion/survival
- see Noble Savages, Chagnon
(67) The stated object of a raid [among the Yanomamo] is to kill one or possibly two men and escape. If the raiders can do without risking losses, however, they may abduct a woman from the enemy village. The abducted woman will be raped by all the raiders, taken to their village, raped by the remaining men in the village, and then given as a wife to one man. She can expect to spend the rest of her life with her new companions.
(68) 30 percent of all Yanomamo men die from violence.
(70) Based on the evidence of the chimpanzees’ alert, enthusiastic behavior, these raids are exciting events for them. And the mayhem visited on their victims looks a world apart from the occasional violence that erupts during a squabble between members of the same community. During these raids on other communities, the attackers act as they do while hunting monkeys [a source of food], except that the target “prey” is a member of their own species. And their assaults are marked by a gratuitous cruelty - tearing off pieces of skin, twisting limbs until they break, drinking the victim’s blood - acts that among humans are considered unspeakable crimes. In Gombe about 30 percent of adult male chimps died from aggression - the same percentage [Napolean] Chagnon found in the Yanomamo villages.
(75) Statistics challenge the notion of the gentle forager. A global assessment of the ethnographers for thirty-one hunter gatherer societies found that 64 percent of them engaged in warfare once every two years, 26 percent fought less often, and only 10 percent were considered to fight wars rarely or never.
- “Myths About Hunter Gatherers,” Ethnology 27, Ember, Carol. 1978.
(77) Other particularly violent peoples: Violence accounted for the deaths of about 19.5 percent of adult men among the Huli of highland New Guinea; 25 and 28.5 percent for Mae Enga and Dugum Dani, also highland New Guinea. 28 percent for the Murngin of Australia.
(79) The rate of violent death among the Waorani [Ecuadorian Amazon] was calculated to be an astonishing 60 percent.
(80) If the Waorani someday become fully Westernized, they will have traded a life marked by the flight of a palm wood spear for one measured by the parabola of a ballistic missile.
- Robarcheck, 1992.
Ch 5. Paradise Imagined
(82) Postclassical Europe developed its own versions of paradise, and by the late Renaissance Europeans were seriously debating whether the newly discovered American continents represented a real-world expression of the ancient fantasy.
- Leo Marx The Machine in the Garden, and F. Turner Beyond Geography.
(91) Tommo in Melville’s Typee: “The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing weapons, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.”
(95) Those who look for importance in genes would hold the environment constant and examine the results of a comparison. Those who want to find the influence of nurture, by contrast, would try to find a case where genes seem constant, and then look for differences imposed by experience. Each side can claim its victories, but contrast these two forces in isolation from each other is absurd. So Galton’s dilemma, nature or nurture, was a false one, an intellectual red herring. Known now as Galton’s Error.
Ch 6. A Question of Temperment
(109) Dahomey Warriors, all female army in West Africa 1851 (now Benin). 5k fighters.
(115, note 15) [the theory that] Men live in the public, women in the private. Public defines private, and therefore, men dominate women.
(116) The most simplistic version of patriarchy theory presumes that male dominance is the particular creation of western civilization, a cultural crime begun at some point in preclassical times and since then perpetrated by white males. British historian Roy Porter argues that sexual violence - rape - is directly associated with the Judeo-Christian patriarchy. “..Of all world civilizations, the West is unique in its unrivaled powers of conquest by military might and colonial expansion. Trade follows the flag, and capitalist economics have likewise drawn on quasi-military goals of competition, expansion, struggle, victory, under the leadership of ‘captains of industry.’” Western male-dominated culture is fundamentally violent, according to Porter, and this ideology of violence has been turned outward, in the militarized domination of other societies, and inward, in a parallel militarization against women.
- “unrivaled” only in global quantity. see for example, Yanomamo treatment of raid captives, (67) above, or (117) below.
(117) A patriarchal, militaristic society in Japan pursued dominance and empire in Asia [while still winning second Sino-Japanese War]…during the month of December in 1937, the Japanese army paused to rape 20,000 women in the former Chinese capital city of Nanking. In 1971, the all-male army of Pakistan, in the process of attempting to keep East Pakistan from becoming Bangladesh, killed perhaps 3 million people and raped between 200k and 400k unarmed Bengali women.
The Conquistadors, sometimes assisted and sometimes resisted by their own Christian counselors, killed tens if not hundreds of millions, brutally plundered and then erased the civilizations of the Aztecs in Mexico, the Mayans in the Yucatan, and the Incas in Peru.
- Bartolome de las Cases, Dominican Bishop, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542).
- Keegan, A History of Warfare (1993).
(120) Friedrich Engels, influenced by Bachofen’s thinking postulated in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that before they were tormented by civilization, humans lived in a state of communal bliss, punctuated by happy promiscuity and a full equality of the sexes. But the invention of animal husbandry led to the accumulation of private property by men. With male ownership of private property came a male desire for systematic inheritance, which led men to control women’s sexuality as a means of clarifying paternity. Once they possessed property, in other words, men wanted to be sure who their real heirs were, and so private property led directly to the subordination of women, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”
(123) Nisa: The Life and Words of a iKung Woman, 1981. Wife battering and deaths. Headman decides victim’s family deserves five goats for the crime.
- darker side of other Bushmen books like The Harmless People (Elizabeth M. Thomas, 1959) and Lost World of the Kalahari (L. Van der Post, 1958).
Ch 7. Relationship Violence
(133) Orangutans are by far the least social of the apes. Mother-infant pairs (or triads, mothers with infants and juvenile offspring) are the only stable and obvious social unit. Infants are entirely dependent on their mothers for several years. Offspring stay with their mothers until early adolescence, around ten years old. And for most of the eight years between births, a mother has no sexual interest in males.
(136) Orangutans at Kutai Game Reserve in Borneo, John Mitani observed 179 matings, of which 88 percent were “forced”…and in Ketambe, Herman Rijksen saw 58 copulations, of which 27 were judged to be rapes.
(137) Wild orangutans nearly always retained and respected an invisible barrier between themselves and humans - but a powerful young male orangutan named Gundul, born in the wild, taken captive, now living free at the research camp as part of an ex-captive release project, had been around people lone enough to have lost his fear of them. One day Gundul attacked and raped an Indonesian cook in camp. Galdikas describes the event in detail. “I had never seen Gundul threaten or assault a woman, although he frequently charged male assistants. The cook was screaming hysterically. I thought, ‘he’s trying to kill her.’” Galdikas, after calling for help, fought the ape with every ounce of her strength, beat him with her fists, attempted to ram a fist down his throat, but with no effect. “I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook.”
Fortunately, the victim was neither seriously injured nor stigmatized. Her friends remained tolerant and supportive. Her husband reasoned that since the rapist was not human, the rape should not provoke shame or rage.
- Birute Galdika, Reflections of Eden. Two decades with Orangutans in Borneo.
(138) In 1989 researcher Craig Palmer surveyed the literature for cases in rape among mammals. He found rape to be routine among only two species of nonhuman mammals: orangutans and elephant seals…The skewed distribution of nonhuman mammalian rape - four out of five known cases for mammals occurring among primates, three of the five in apes - suggests that apes are an unusually violent species, while it also shows that a few other nonhuman mammals do rape.
(142) For humans and orangutans, a sufficient supporting mob of kin or others could stop a rapist. And it is precisely a mob that the female orangutan lacks. Female orangutans live alone. Female gorillas, on the other hand, live in troops that are protected from strange males by the female’s own strong bond with a chosen mate…Gorillas living in troops are safe from rape. Orangutans, because they live alone, are vulnerable.
(148) Gorillas and infanticide: Diane Fossey’s data suggest that 1 in 7 infant deaths are from infanticide. The figures suggest that the average gorilla female experiences infanticide at least once in her lifetime.
(149) The very act of infanticide makes the killer attractive [to the victim/mother].
(151) When another male breaks through the defenses and kills her infant, she responds in a way that violates all our assumptions about attachment, loss, and revenge. It may take a few days before the female leaves her troop, but the evidence is clear. Infanticide draws a female to a male. She leaves her old mate and joins the killer. She may mate with him, have babies with him, and spend the rest of her life with him The female’s choice is imposed by the logic of violence, by the threat of her next infant. The new silverback has become her hired gun in an ape universe of silverback baby killers.
(151) Three kinds of violence:
- Chimps: Raiding and ‘murder,’ and female battering, but no infanticide, some rape. (Party-gang group formation)
- Orangutans: Most females are raped in their life, but no infanticide, and no raiding. (More solitary)
- Gorillas: Infanticide, but no raiding or rape or battering. (Stable troop group formation)
Ch 8. The Price of Freedom
(158) In the Serengeti, a quarter of all infants [lions] are sacrificed on the altar of infanticidal male selfishness.
(165) Party-Gang Species: Coalitionary bonds and variable party size.
- coalitionary bond: relationships of same-sex adults used in aggression against others of the same sex
- Party: temporary groups that may last hours from a single community (chimps and humans)
- Troop: Permanent Group (gorillas and some monkeys)
(165) Chimpanzees and spotted hyenas both live in societies that are xenophobic, wandering in small parties, fighting with neighbors. Considering only those aspects, we could imagine both as lawless humans: gunslingers and desperadoes in the Wild West, marooned British schoolboys in Lord of the Flies, nihilistic street gangs in South Central LA.
(166) For chimps, a lost territory means death for adult males, but not for females. Females have more options, more freedom, even if they suffer to take advantage of it. When the K-group community of chimps in Mahale was reduced to a single male in 1979, five fertile females joined the neighboring M-group. At least four infants born subsequently to these females were killed by the M-group males, but after those first killings, later babies were allowed to live. No such luck for males on the losing side. The dominant sex lives and dies by its territory, but the subordinate sex can sometimes migrate and thereby survive. We have seen the same pattern among humans in primitive wars.
(167) Why are human males given to vicious, lethal aggression? Thinking only of war, putting aside for a moment rape and battering and murder, the curse stems from our species’ own special party-gang traits: coalitionary bonds among males, male dominion over an expandable territory, and variable party size. The combination of these traits means that killing a neighboring male is usually worthwhile, and can often be done safely.
(169) The cost-of-grouping theory appears to explain why some species live in stable troops while other species live in party gangs. Party-gang species, for ecological reasons, cannot afford to live in permanent troops year round. They simply happen to possess lifestyles that make grouping very useful at some times and quite costly at others. These are lifestyles centered on eating high-quality but sometimes hard to find foods. Foods, perhaps, that pop up seasonally or grow in patches variable in size and density. Foods that are especially nutritious when you can find them, but are often unavailable. Foods that may be abundant one moment and rare the next. Foods like ripe fruits and fat-rich nuts and juicy roots and meats. Foods like the ones that both chimpanzees and humans have evolved to rely on.
So the party-gang patterns of chimpanzees and humans probably come from out being connoisseurs of high-quality foods that are often too scarce to allow friends or allies to forage together regularly without some or all of them starting. If only we were like gorillas and could sit down in a mountain meadow eating leaves all day, we could cheerfully live in stable troops.
- party-gang species (connoisseurs) vs troop species (leaf eaters)
(171) Timeline:
- 4.5 M yrs ago: upright walking
- Australopithecus (“Lucy”)
- 2 M yrs ago: stone tools and more wide spread meat eating
- 2 M - .5M ago: brain expansion
- 1.5 M ago: fire
- 150 K ago: language
- 70 K: “fiction,” story telling (see Sapiens book)
- 10 K: agriculture
- 7 K: war (Jericho)
- 3 K: writing, 1K gun powder, 100 ago vehicles
Ch 9. Legacies
(173) Males who are better fighters can stop other males from mating, and they mate more successfully themselves. Better fighters tend to have more babies. That’s the simple, stupid, selfish logic of sexual selection. So, what about us? Is sexual selection ultimately the reason why men brawl in barrooms, form urban gangs, plot guerrilla attacks, and go to war? Has it indeed designed men to be especially aggressive?
- power = conquest = expansion of genetics and territory/resources = power
(176) The Seville Statement on Violence, 1987: pronouncing warfare to be “a particularly human phenomenon,” one that “does not occur in other animals,” a strangely destructive sort of activity scientifically proved to be “a product of culture,” having only minor “biological connection…primarily through language.” This declaration placed the ultimate seal of approval on the position that “biology does not condemn humanity to war,” and that therefore humanity can soar to freedom, having broken away from “the bondage of biological pessimism.” Quite a statement. Its motives were clearly on the side of the angels. But liking the idea doesn’t make it right.
Much of the logic that underlies it is certainly wrong, for the simple reason that it falls into that century-old trap, Francis Galton’s false dichotomy, Galton’s Error. Particularly when important issues are at stake, this attractive oversimplification - that species characteristics must come from either nature or nurture but not from both - lures even brilliant people into a wrong conclusion.
- See So Human an Animal for culturally and environmentally “determined” human life.
(180) Chimps today are close to using hand-held weapons. Throughout the continent, wild chimps will tear off and throw great branches when they are angry or threatened, or they will pick up and throw rocks. Humphrey, when he was the alpha male at Gombe, almost killed me once by sending a melon-sized rock whistling less than a meter from my head. They also hit with big sticks. A celebrated film taken in Guinea shows wild chimps pounding meter long clubs down on the back of a leopard. (Scientists were able to get that film because the leopard was a stuffed one, placed there by a curious researcher. The chimps were lucky to find a leopard so slow to fight back). Chimps in West Africa already have primitive stone tool technology, and there could well be a community of chimps today, waiting to be discovered, who are already using heavy sticks as clubs against each other. Certainly we can reasonably imagine that the woodland apes did some of these things.
(183) Hyenas normally bear twins in a dark den with only the mother present. Unlike any other carnivore, including even their close cousins the striped hyenas, these appealing [spotted hyena] cubs emerge with fully functional front teeth, including strong, gripping incisors and long, puncturing canines. Their eyes are wide open, their necks and jaws are strong.
Why the precocial teeth? Why the coordinated heads? For killing each other. Fratricide is routine. Experiments in captivity show that the first clear inclination of the newly born spotted hyenas is to bite, then shake the head with muscles unnaturally strong for one so young. In captivity they’ll bite at anything, even a cloth. Down in the gloom of the den there are no cloths, but there is a twin sibling, born within an hour of the first and destined to be attacked quickly, even sometimes before it has left its amniotic sac. Sometimes the second born may fight back well enough to win. But whoever wins, the weaker cub will often die, most likely from starvation, loser in a brutal competition for its mother’s milk. Biologist Laurene Frank and his colleagues estimate that in Kenya’s Masai Mara Game Reserve a quarter of all hyena babies are killed by their twins. The violent baby vividly reminds us how starkly aggressive behavior can be shaped by natural selection.
(189) Antonio Demasio, neurologist. Damage to ventromedial part of the prefrontal cortex leads to two main results: first, a general lack of initiative; and second, a strange emotional vacuum, so that the sufferer is dispassionate and uninvolved in the surrounding world, no longer caring about life…Intellectual stasis, the ability to analyze hypothetical problems, but never come to a conclusion…[the patient] persisted in any given task, never deciding that it was time to move one to the next problem. Though he could think as well as ever, he had lost the capacity to decide.
Such patients can’t decide, thinks Demasio, because their brains are unable to connect an emotional value to the intellectual menu of possible options. Without being able to feel which solution they like, they have no way to choose. These patients seem to demonstrate that pure reason is inadequate for reaching a decision, a hypothesis that Demasio applies to all of us. Reason generates the list of possibilities. Emotion chooses from that list.
(190) We are now ready to ask what causes aggression. If emotion is the ultimate arbiter of action for both species, then what kinds of emotions underlie violence in both? Clearly there are many. But one stands out. From the raids of chimps at Gombe to wars among human nations, the same emotion looks extraordinarily important, one that we take for granted and describe most simply but that nonetheless takes us deeply back to our animal origins: pride.
(191) A male chimp in his prime organizes his whole life around issues of rank. His attempts to achieve and then maintain alpha status are cunning, persistent, energetic, and time-consuming. They affect whom he travels with, whom he grooms, where he glances, how often he scratches, where he goes, and what time he gets up in the morning (nervous alpha males get up early, and often wake others with their overeager charging displays). And all these behaviors come not from a drive to be violent for its own sake, but from a set of emotions that, when people show them, are labeled as pride, or more negatively, arrogance.
- Pride (negative): irrationally corrupt sense of one's personal value, status or accomplishments, used synonymously with hubris. an unreasonable sense of self importance.
- Pride (positive): a content sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, and a fulfilled feeling of belonging.
(192) Peloponnesian War, 431 - 404 BCE. The essential dynamic, according to Thucydides, was that Sparta watched the growth of Athenian power, feared the outcome, and decided to counter the threat. Michael Howard argues that the same logic applies throughout history, from the Peloponnesian War to the World Wars of the 20th century. Men fight, he says, “neither because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because that are reasoning ones: because they discern, or believe that they can discern, dangers before they become immediate, the possibility of threats before they are made.
- Pride / survival dynamic: self interest in extending our way of life at the expense of others > group loyalty > ethnocentrism (“in group, out group bias”).
- so we reason first, then make an emotional decision? or perhaps we make emotional decisions first, then reason it out later, I.e. justify it.
(195) Robber’s Cave Experiment, Oklahoma, 1950s. 11 yr old boys camp. People quickly form groups, favor those in their own group, and are ready to be aggressive to outsiders.
- “the desire to be part of a group is perhaps the strongest human emotion,” ??
(196) As an emotion promoting intragroup solidarity and intergroup hostility, ingroup-outgroup bias is perfectly expected in a species with a long history of intergroup aggression. Stupid and cruel as it often is, this bias may have evolved as part of the winners’ strategy. Darwin put it this way: ‘A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.’ Darwin wrote that passage to show how morality could emerge out of natural selection for solidarity. And, of course, the concept that moral behavior, the ‘in-group’ half of in-group-outgroup bias, has roots in evolutionary history is attractive. But from beneath that attractive idea we can also dig out the unattractive one: that morality based on intragroup loyalty worked, in evolutionary history, because it made groups more effectively aggressive.
- compare George Lakoff’s work. Conservatives live by the strict father model, where disdain for the ‘other’ and group loyalty is paramount; Liberals live by the nurturing parent model, where empathy is paramount. This directs the moral behavior of each. In one, the distinction between Us and Them is sharp, and ready to be violently defended. In the other the distinction between Us and Them is diffuse, ready to be carefully considered.
(197) The sheer excitement of the moment works like a drug [violence, lynchings] - just something that happens to individuals losing themselves in the excitement of crowds. In losing themselves, though, they also commonly lose their reasoning and surrender to unexamined emotions.
- like the drug/excitement of dominating/destroying Nature, which propels modern civilization in its short, myopic frenzy.
(198) Bill Buford describes the excitement of being in a crowd at a soccer game: “I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence…What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness.”
Deindividuation is the formal name for the mindless sinking of personal identity into the group of Us.
- see Tribe (S Junger) for the Military as an example of institutionalized deindivuation. Why/how we crave it. Why it’s healthy. Loss of group-feeling results in PTSD. Modern society is currently going through the trauma of extreme individualism. Concerts and sporting events temporarily soothe our need, but in those we are only spectators, therefore our unconscious desires are only virtually satisfied, which results in built up pressure which can be released in the sublimated form of drugs, drunkness, dullardism, as well as the pathological form of domestic violence, mass shootings, barroom brawls, etc.
(199) The problem is that males are demonic at unconscious and irrational levels [remember we analyze with our rational brains, but we decide with our emotional brains]. The motivation of a male chimp who challenges another’s rank is not that he forces more matings or better food or a longer life. Those rewards explain why sexual selection has favored the desire for power, but the immediate reason he vies for status is simpler, deeper, and less subject to the vagaries of context. It is simply to dominate his peers…the motivation of male chimps on border patrol is not to gain land or win females. The temperamental goal is to intimidate the opposition, to beat them to a pulp, to erode their ability to challenge. Winning has become an end in itself.
- pride/arrogance: the unconscious desire for growth/expansion/self survival. What is the balance for the pathological form of this? The Empathy of G. Lakoff’s liberals?
Ch 10. The Gentle Ape
(206) [Bonobos, Congo Basin] If a son or his mother is harassed, the mother’s group of females is always liable to counterattack in her support…The effect of the massed rally is overwhelming. Female power wins. By contrast, the males never cooperate with each other, either to defend themselves or to attack females. Thus, even the highest ranking male can be defeated when females gang up on him.
- See E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth.
(208) Adolescent female bonobos leave their families, migrate to a new communities, and settle there. She incorporates herself by aligning herself with older female of the new group, ultimately engaging in a “romantic” relationship to cement the bond.
(211) The unseating of an alpha male from his position of highest dominance can lead to life threatening wounds among chimps, but no such wounds have been seen among competing bonobos. In other words, bonobo aggression tends to be much less severe.
(211) Chimp males form alliances, as we have seen, which are crucial for their success in gaining and keeping high rank. Bonobo males don’t.
- male alliances result in destructive violence, female alliances don’t.
(212) Among chimps, copulation attempts by low ranking males are often stopped by high ranking males, especially near ovulation time. This happens very rarely among bonobos.
Why don’t bonobo males care about who gets to mate? The answer looks simple. Males can’t tell when females are ovulation, apparently because the crucial smells that signal the approach of ovulation to a male chimp are simply absent in female bonobos.
(213) Bonobos start having sex long before the onset of puberty - from about one year old [puberty is reached at 8-9 years old].
(213) Bonobos use sex for much more than making babies. They have sex as a way to make friends. They have sex to calm someone who is tense. They have sex as a way to reconcile after aggression.
(216) The Chimp’s visceral reaction to a hunt and a kill [of monkeys] is intense excitement. The forest comes alive with the barks and hoots and cries of the apes, and aroused chimps race from several directions. The monkey may be eaten alive, shrieking as it is torn apart. Dominant males try to seize the prey, leading to fights and charges and screams of rage. For one or two hours or more, the thrilled apes tear apart and devour the monkey. This is blood lust in its rawest form.
Bonobos like meat, too. Like chimps, they are ready to grab and eat small envelope infants. They eat flying squirrels and sometimes earthworms. But remarkably (since they are so similar to chimps in their body size and physical abilities), they have never been seen eating monkeys.
(217) [In cases where bonobos catch monkeys], the bonobos tried to get the monkeys to play. The observers thought the bonobos were treating their monkeys like dolls or pets, not prey.
Ch 11. Message From the Southern Forests
(224) Bonobos can afford to live in larger, more stable parties than chimps because they live in a world without gorillas [chimps share the same geography/ecosystem as gorillas]. They have evolved to take advantage of the more digestible parts of the gorilla diet - not the tough, low quality stems that occur in patches around swamps, but the juicy, protein rich growth buds and stem bases of young herbs. We even can see the marks of this evolution in their teeth: Bonobo teeth have longer shearing edges than those of chimps, adapted for eating herbs in a way that surprised people when they first discovered it in 1984. Bonobos have evolved in a forest that is kindlier in its food supply, and that allows them to be kindly too.
- Chimps and gorillas both live on right bank of Zaire River. Bonobos live on the left bank.
- no gorillas present > more high quality plant foods > stable party size > female cooperation > female dominant
- see So Human an Animal for environmentally shaped evolution
(227) Among bonobos, the existence of [particularly nutritious] herbs gives all individuals the luxury of company, so every party remains capable of putting up a good defense, and raiders into neighboring ground will not find a vulnerable loner [as opposed to chimps who share gorilla habitat].
(227) Around the same time that bonobos and chimp ancestors began their evolutionary divergence, 2 to 2.5 million years ago, another great event was unfolding a few hundred kilometers away, in the savanna woodlands. One line of woodland apes was evolving into humans. Most likely, a drying event led to the loss of fruit trees and thereby pressed one particular population into a full commitment to terrestrial life. This was the start of the genus Homo.
Ch 12. Taming the Demon
(231) Stripped to its ape essence, patriotism is male defense of the community.
(235) Nothing a woman can do will expand her reproduction rate in a way equivalent to a man mating with several women…Because of the large potential reproductive rewards at stake for males, sexual selection has apparently favored male temperaments that revel in high-risk/high gain ventures. At the individual level, this temperamental quality can show relatively trivial effects. Men may sometimes drive their cars faster or gamble more intensely or perhaps play sports more recklessly than women. But the sort of relatively discountable wildness that, for example, hikes automobile insurance rates for adolescent boys and young men also produces a greater willingness to risk their own and others’ lives; and that sort of risk attraction becomes very significant once men acquire weapons. And where men combine into groups - gangs or villages or tribes or nations - this driving, adventurous ethic turns quickly aggressive and lethally serious. Based on this logic, we conclude that imperialism derives partly from the fact that human foreign policy is based on male rather than female reproductive interests.
- Berman’s “aggressive sub-group”
(239) It seems likely that women have evolved to prefer demonic males (or imitation demonic males) as mates. This inclination makes good sense in evolutionary terms for two reasons. First, the demonic male is the one who tends to protect the female best from violence by other males and thus keeps her and her offspring safe. And second, as long as demonic males are the most successful reproducers, any female who mates with them is provided with sons who themselves will likely be good producers.
(241) Fredrich Engels regarded the historical institution of marriage as the beginning of the end for humankind: the start of the bourgeois family, patriarchy, and from there class and social struggle. For Engels, as for many traditional feminists, women are caught in a trap constructed by men - one marked with violence and perpetrated though a patriarchy of specific historic and social origins.
(243) The problem in both human and ape history is that political power is built on physical power - and physical power is ultimately the power of violence or its threat.
(248) The system of thought, feeling, and behavior is no different in its dynamic and underlying psychology from that of a thousand other predominantly male groups, including urban gangs, motorcycle gangs, criminal organizations, pre-state warrior societies, and even the more formalized and state-sponsored armies (which after all, still organize their fundamental fighting units at the platoon level). The psychology engaged may be hardly different from that expressed in predominantly male team sports - American football and hockey, for example. This behavior is familiar, not alien, and it reiterates a pattern as old and wide as the species. Demonic males gather in small, self perpetuating, self aggrandizing bands. They sight or invent an enemy “over there” - across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack.
(249) Accepting that men have a vastly long history of violence implies that they have been temperamentally shaped to use violence effectively, and that they will therefore find it hard to stop. It is startling, perhaps, to recognize the absurdity of the system: one that works to benefit our genes rather than our conscious selves, and that inadvertently jeopardizes the fate of all our descendants.
- See Paradox and Equilibrium essay for what some kind of balance could look like. Learning how to live without attaching to ideologies (which then engenders Us vs Them). Or as one history professor once put it, “I’m skeptical of anyone who believes in ideas.”
(249) As we survey societies from Ancient Greece to modern day nations we can detect no clear pattern in the overall rates of death from intergroup violence, which remain between 5 and 65 per 100,000 per year.
Ch 13. Kamana’s Doll
(256) Animal complexity and intelligence have increased steadily in the 4 billion years of life’s history. One billion years ago the cleverest species was some unknown microscopic bit of goo. At 100 million, a fish perhaps, or an early mammal. AT 10 million, an ape or a dolphin. At a million, early humans, maybe already on the verge of using some simple form of language.
(257) The real danger is that our species combines demonic males with a burning intelligence - and therefore a capacity for creation and destruction without precedent. That great human brain is nature’s most frightening product.